Making Space for What Comes Next
It feels strange to wake up with a sense of loss when nothing has actually been lost.
Some feelings resist explanation. They arrive without invitation and without evidence, and the harder you press them for a reason, the more they retreat into silence. I have learned, over the years, that certain things have the power to unlock something deep inside me — something that lives well below the conscious mind, behind doors that stay closed until the circumstances are exactly right. A spoken word. A touch. A warm breeze moving through an open window. A shiver that arrives from nowhere and says nothing and means everything. When those gates open, whatever has been waiting behind them rises — not urgently, but with the quiet certainty of something that has simply been patient.
I don't know precisely why I woke with this feeling of loss. But I suspect it has something to do with transition — with the ongoing, unglamorous work of letting go of the old and making honest room for the new.
Who I was feels like a lifetime away now. And yet I know there are still remnants — old habits, old thoughts — lodged in the deeper crevices of the soul, waiting to be acknowledged and finally released. I am getting the feeling, with a clarity I don't entirely know what to do with, that it is time. Time to bid farewell to what no longer serves. Time to stop carrying what was never meant to come this far. Time to step fully into everything that has been learned, absorbed, and quietly integrated over these past few years — and let it become, without apology, who I actually am.
In a strange way, I feel as though I am standing at a threshold. Ready, finally, to be done with what created the past, and to walk honestly forward into whatever comes next. What that looks like remains unknown. But the feeling of loss, oddly, is providing more clarity about it than certainty ever has.
That feeling didn't survive the first hour of training. Looking back, it was never really going to.
The day turned out to be genuinely fun — there is simply no better word for it. Training flowed. The form moved through me with a naturalness that felt earned rather than forced, the 108 finding its way a little deeper into my body and my understanding with every repetition. And by the end of the day, I completed the form from beginning to end — the whole thing, unbroken — which felt, quietly and completely, wonderful.
So I look back now at that early morning feeling of loss — which seemed so heavy, so real, so full of weight when the day began — and I can only think that perhaps it was never loss at all. Perhaps it was simply space being made. Room being cleared for something new to land.
It matters little whether that is literally true. What matters is that a day which began in the quiet fog of uncertainty became, through nothing more complicated than practice and presence, a day of new beginnings.
That is enough. That is more than enough.
It matters little if this is true. However, what does matter is that a day that started in a pondering way, through practice, became a wonderful day of new beginnings.